Joshua Wöhle
Joshua Wöhle is one of the five founders of London-based SuperAwesome, the children’s web safety and parental control services firm, that reached more than 500 million children a month when it was sold to Epic Games in 2020. A developer by background, with a Computer Science degree from King’s College in London, UK, and an MBA from the Open University, Joshua was born in Amsterdam and has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and now in London, UK.
Please note that the views expressed in this interview are made by the individual and not on behalf of Rothschild & Co.
Q1
Hi Josh, as the (now exited) Co-Founder of the world's biggest kids technology company – SuperAwesome – what need did you see in the market for your product, what was the solution and how was it received?
SuperAwesome was started some 8 years ago with just a few people in a small office in London. It was founded on the vision to make the internet safer for kids. I have always been passionate about coding and interested in apps and their development. At the same time, with my co-founder we saw how complicated their use could be. This gave us the idea to create a platform that would promote kids' safety online. Back then we didn't realise the scale of the project and how big it was going to be. Being one of the first companies to create such a platform we met a couple of challenges along the way. One initial challenge for example was to enable compliance with the US's Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and parallel regulatory regimes such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the GDPR- K which is the portion of GDPR governing children’s privacy (see boxout). Another challenge for us was that we were a little ahead of our time, so we struggled to be understood and make people passionate about the topic of online child safety. People were quick to admit that the topic was important but at the same time we couldn't get anyone to actually do something about it. During the 2010s the mood changed. First the Edward Snowden leaks happened and a few years later the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. This threw light on the issue of online privacy and as a result our business case became much easier for customers and investors to understand. Before that, online privacy had been a peripheral matter which few had really engaged with. Suddenly, the topic was centre stage and the whole dynamic changed. This was especially so for companies whose key customers were children, such as online gaming companies, where calls to address children safety online grew increasingly vocal. The time was right - we had spent the previous five years developing and advocating for software solutions to ensure the safety of kids data and we found ourselves in the right place at the right time. SuperAwesome took off.
Protecting Kids
Children's Online Privacy Protecion Act (COPPA) is a federal privacy law in the United States that came into force in 2000. It has since been revised a number of times by the Federal Trade Commission. It protects the personal information of children under 13 years of age and requires website and online service operators to obtain parental or guardian consent for the collection of that personal information.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in 2018. Non-compliance can result in significantly higher fines than have been issued before with an upper limit of 20 million euros or 4% or annual global turnover, whichever is higher. Under the GDPR, children under 16 merit specific protection, which includes adopting measures to verify a child's age and managing consent.
GDPR-K requires apps or sites directed at children under 16 (or younger depending on the EU country) to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting any personal information about the child.